Today’s GSDdaily is episode 148. We’re going to talk about how to scale an affiliate marketing business. We’ve been talking about affiliate marketing programs all week. So Monday, I introduced this idea of affiliate marketing to you and showed you two ways that you can generate revenue as an affiliate using Amazon’s affiliate program, which is the easiest to understand, and then we also talked about ClickBank, which is digital products, for the most part, and has a lot higher commission rate. So oftentimes you can make 40%, 50% up to 75% commission when you’re selling those digital products. Then yesterday, we talked about automating your affiliate marketing journey, three different ways that you can automate your affiliate marketing revenue, and today we’re going to talk about scaling your affiliate business.
Now, in the affiliate world, I mean, it’s all numbers related. The unfortunate truth is that when you’re promoting affiliate products, you don’t control most of the sales process. So the only thing you really control is what kind of traffic you’re sending to the affiliate offer and how well they are pre-qualified into the affiliate offer. So you can control what is it Facebook Ads? Is it Google Ads? Is it email list traffic? Is it exit popup traffic? I mean, there are lots of different kinds of traffic that you can send to an affiliate program. The quality of that traffic is going to directly influence how much money you’re going to make from the affiliate program. SEO is another one.
The other thing you can influence is how they are pre-framed when they get to the sales page. Oftentimes, marketers, use advertorials for this. So what we do is we send traffic from a traffic source to an advertorial. The advertorial is usually a blog post or something and it just works to pre-frame a prospect into the offer we’re about to make. Then inside that blog post, we’ll include links and buttons and images and all kinds of stuff that act as psychological triggers to get them thinking about owning the product and then ultimately buying the product. They click through the blog post, they click through the advertorial and then they go buy.
Now, once they click through that affiliate link, your control over the process is done. So as an affiliate, you don’t have any control over the sales copy or the sales pages or their email copy or any of that stuff. You only control up until that moment that the affiliate link is clicked. The blessing of that is that it reduces your responsibility and your headaches considerably when you’re promoting an affiliate product that sells well, that is converting well, that has high customer satisfaction. When you’re promoting an affiliate product that is new or hasn’t been tested or proven, then sometimes it’s a lot longer road to actually generate money from an affiliate marketing program.
1. Promote Different Products
So one of the best ways to scale an affiliate marketing is to either go deep, as in you’re promoting not just one product, not just one fitness product, let’s say. You’re promoting eight fitness products or 12 fitness products, including some blog posts. So you go really deep. You don’t just promote the first, you put somebody on an email list and then you promote the first, and if they don’t buy that or even if they do buy that, then you promote the second product, then the third product, then the fourth product, then the fifth product.
Now, people aren’t just going to read your email and buy shit because you tell them to, so you have to give them value. As you’re going deep with your product line, you have to send them the blog posts. You have to send them the videos. You have to teach them and educate them and have fun and it’s a job, it’s a business. Do you know what I mean? So you can promote 12 products, but you’re going to have 14 or 15 or 20 different kinds of blog posts or pieces of content in between those products that serve to re-engage them, that serve to build up goodwill as you’re promoting to them. So that’s how you go long and you can pick 10 different products on Amazon that your customer, your avatar is going to enjoy. You can find those things easily enough.
Even in ClickBank, let’s say you’re promoting an investing ebook, then you might have… The first offer might be an investing book, the second one might be a piece of software, the third offer you promote might be a video course, the fourth offer might be another piece of software. So you can promote, you can stack eight or 10 different affiliate offers in this email sequence to go really deep. So you generate the lead once and then hopefully that lead buys one thing, two things, three things, eight things from you within the lifespan that they are with you. So that’s one way. That’s how to scale an affiliate marketing business by going deep.
2. Promote Wide Product Selection
The other one is to go wide, and how this works is you might not necessarily have a lot of products deep-wise. So a great example of this is photography. If you’re going to scale an affiliate marketing as a photographer, there’s really only probably four or five good solid products that you would want to promote as an affiliate. Now, what happens after you promote those four or five products? Or what happens if you promote two and you don’t want to promote the other ones? Well, you go sideways, you go wide with them. So what are some of the other things that photographers are interested in? It’s not just photography courses, might be photography gear, and it might be lights, it might be softboxes, it might be video camera equipment, it might be audio. Maybe these photographers also get into video.
So it’s just about knowing your customer avatar and knowing what else they buy. Another great example and I didn’t even realize this until forever ago, but so I’ve always been in the business development space. So I have a business development list and I was promoting business development affiliate offers probably eight years ago. One of my friends came in and he said, “Hey, I have this gold offer that is converting really well to business lists like yours.” I was like, “Okay, cool.” It’s how to invest in gold and how to invest in silver. I was like, “That doesn’t make sense because I have this business development list, but I’m sending a gold offer, a survival offer?” He’s like, “Just trust me, just send it.”
Wouldn’t you know, I sent it out. I generated a couple of grand in affiliate commissions, which at the time was good, even for what I was promoting from a business development standpoint. Ever since then, I started thinking, “Okay. Now, any list that we run for our clients or any lists that we run internally, we’re not just promoting the most obvious thing. We’re also trying to find something else that they get into.” So if it’s health and fitness, sometimes it’s not just health and fitness that they’re into. It might also be survival. It might also be starting a business. It might also be self-help, like personal development, kind of mind-movies kind of stuff. So there are lots of different verticals that the same target avatar is going to participate in.
You just have to find those verticals and sometimes the best way to find those verticals is by serving them. We’ve talked about serving a lot on this, on the live streams. To send an email out to the list, survey them, and see what happens. Ask them what else they’re interested in, find some offers in that space, and then mail them out. So those are two ways to scale an affiliate marketing business.
For Questions and Guide
For those of you who need help with your business, whether it’s driving traffic, converting traffic into sales, whatever, just go to doneforyou.com/start or consultingsession.com. Fill out the little form and book a call and we’ll get on the phone and walk through an action plan with you. Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about expanding an affiliate business into some other things. So I will see you tomorrow at 1 PM Eastern, and we’ll go from there.
